Latest news with #UniversityofErlangen-Nuremberg
Forbes
23-04-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Treating Autoimmune Diseases: Four New Technologies To Watch
Scientists from Belgian biotech company etherna, who are working on inverse RNA vaccines for ... More multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases. For decades, the only option available to patients suffering from debilitating autoimmune diseases, which attack the body's own tissues, has been to suppress the immune system with corticosteroids or anti-cytokine antibodies. But while these treatments can ease symptoms, they come with a hidden long-term cost. Dampening the immune system's normal function over many years makes patients more vulnerable to opportunistic infections and cancer, creating a significant need for more sophisticated alternatives. As a venture investor following emerging trends in public health, I've been particularly concerned by data indicating that these diseases are on the rise. According to the U.S. National Health Council, rates of autoimmunity are approaching epidemic levels, with most autoimmune diseases being diagnosed in growing numbers in recent decades. The causes are not fully understood, but they're thought to range from changing lifestyle factors such as dietary patterns and sleep deprivation, to increasing exposure to harmful environmental toxins or viruses. We need better therapies, and fortunately, there are a few emerging technologies which could change the treatment landscape. CAR T-cell therapy is best known as a form of cancer immunotherapy, but it could also be a way of eliminating autoreactive B cells, a category of immune cells which underpin many autoimmune diseases by producing autoantibodies which target the body's own cells and tissues, causing damage. Back in 2022, researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany showed that administering CAR T-cell therapy to five people with severe lupus could completely remove the aberrant B cells, sending all of the patients into remission. But CAR T-cell therapy is not easy to scale for thousands of patients. However, a company called Coding Bio is working on an approach which CEO and co-founder Simon Bornschein describes as a more 'off-the-shelf' solution, developing so-called immune engager molecules which can help trigger precision killing of the autoreactive B cells. 'A lot of companies are moving towards such immune engagers, as they can be manufactured at scale to address a large patient population,' says Bornschein. One of the main causes of autoimmune diseases are immunoglobulin G (IgG) autoantibodies. Many patients are thus treated with intensive and laborious infusions of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy. While IVIG can be effective, it is often difficult for patients to tolerate because it is administered in large doses, with infusion sessions of up to eight hours at a time. One of Leaps by Bayer's portfolio companies, Nuvig Therapeutics, is working on a more effective and convenient alternative. One of the reasons that IVIG works is because there is a crucial fraction of the IgGs present in IVIG that are sialylated. Sialylation, or the addition of a sugar group to the antibody, alters where these antibodies eventually bind, helping switch the immune environment back to a more anti-inflammatory state. Pamela Conley, co-founder and CSO at Nuvig, says that the company has identified a way to capture the anti-inflammatory activity of sialylated IgGs in a novel drug. The resulting molecule, named NVG-2089, has been found to be 10-20 times more potent than IVIG in preclinical studies and so can be administered in much lower doses. 'It means it can be a much shorter therapy, smaller volumes, and an easier infusion to tolerate because of the increased potency of our drug,' she says. Nuvig has since completed a Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers which showed NVG-2089 to be safe and well-tolerated and are now moving into a Phase 2 trial in patients with a neuro-autoimmune disease called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. While normal RNA vaccines train the immune system to recognize and attack antigens associated with a virus or cancer cells, a growing number of companies have been considering a so-called 'inverse vaccine.' Because autoimmune diseases are caused by autoantibodies binding to autoantigens on the body's own cells, their concept is to use RNA to train the immune system to forget these autoantigens. This can be done through boosting the numbers of regulatory T cells, which suppress a particular immune response, linked to a particular autoantigen. Belgian-based biotech etherna is now collaborating with Hasselt University with the aim of using this concept to develop a mRNA-based treatment for multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases. 'The benefit of amplifying disease-suppressing Tregs is the potential to restore self-tolerance to autoantigens, resulting in long-term therapeutic effects,' says Bernard Sagaert, CEO of etherna. Instead of changing the function of IgG antibodies, we could also just use enzymes to break them down into fragments, an approach known as antibody cleaving. This strategy is being pioneered by a Swedish biotech called Hansa Biopharma, which is running a series of clinical trials in various autoimmune conditions where disease progression is linked to IgG antibodies mistakenly launching inflammatory attacks on the body's organ systems. The company has developed two enzymes, imlifidase and HNSA-5487, which are capable of rapidly degrading IgG antibodies and inhibiting their activity. 'We believe that they have the potential to address unmet need in IgG-driven autoimmune diseases where faster acting treatment options are needed,' says Hitto Kaufmann, Hansa Biopharma's Chief R&D Officer. The company recently completed patient enrollment for a global Phase 3 trial in anti-glomerular basement membrane (anti-GBM) disease, a rare condition where the immune system mistakenly attacks the kidneys and the lungs. An intriguing Phase 2 trial of imlifidase in addition to IVIG treatment, showed positive results in patients with Guillain Barré Syndrome, helping them recover muscle strength and independent walking ability. As these emerging therapies develop, I'm cautiously optimistic that we're nearing some major breakthroughs in our decades-long quest to stop the body attacking its own tissues and organs, which will hopefully allow people diagnosed with these debilitating illnesses to live longer and better lives. Thank you to David Cox for additional research and reporting on this article.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Successfully Revived Brain Tissue from Suspended Animation
This is the first time that brain tissue has been cryogenically frozen and revived without damage. In a process called vitrification, researchers treated slices of mouse brains with cryoprotectants which protected ice crystals from forming and destroying the tissue When the slices of brain were revived, they showed a return to electrical activity, and it is possible they may have even held on to memories Putting humans into a state of suspended animation have been a sci-fi aspiration for decades. In Ridley Scott's iconic film Alien, the crew of the Nostromo emerge from cryo-pods as they approach a distant exoplanet, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series sees some characters in a state of cryo-sleep for decades, sometimes more than a century. But none of that is remotely realistic—right? Not so fast. Researcher Alexander German of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany has now found a way to cryogenically induce a state of suspended animation in hippocampus slices from mouse brains—and then revive them. German and his team put the brain segments in a deep freeze for a week and then warmed them back up to find that electrical activity had returned to almost normal levels. This step forward builds on previous experiments that have tried to revive cryogenically frozen mammalian tissue. A 2006 study that attempted to freeze and revive hippocampal slices from rat brains came close, but there was not enough evidence for the level of reanimation that German has now achieved. Until now, whether living brain tissue could be shut down by freezing and then regain function was unknown. Cryopreservation involves more than just freezing. Tissue frozen without cryoprotectants is susceptible to damage from the formation of ice crystals, ultimately resulting in loss of function and cell death. This is why German's team used a method known as vitrification. Since the early 1980s, vitrification experiments have been found to preserve tissues with cryoprotectants that prevent the crystallization of ice and turn supercooled bodily fluids into a glassy, amorphous solid. 'Based on stereomicroscopy assessment of tissue swelling and crystallization, as well as the degree of electrophysical recovery, we optimized a vitrification procedure that minimizes damage,' the researchers said in a study recently posted on the preprint server bioArxiv. The cryoprotective agents German planned on using were designed to be nontoxic and minimize the risk of tissue injury from shrinking, swelling, crystallization and cracking. Once prepared with these cryoprotectants, the brain slices were cooled to -196 °C (about -321 °F) in liquid nitrogen. This is important because a direct transfer to liquid nitrogen without cryoprotective treatment would have caused the tissue to crack. They were then kept in a -150 °C (-238 °F) freezer for a week. When the slices of mouse hippocampus were taken out and brought up to -10 °C (14 °F), observations showed that there had been no crystallization during the cooling or rewarming phase. Tests showed that the revived brain tissue had just about fully recovered and had resume electrical activity. The fragile synapses that connect nerve cells and pass impulses through them were intact, and German thought it was even possible (although not yet proven) that memories could have been preserved. 'Normal spontaneous synaptic events revealed that brain activity re-initializes after cessation of all continuous dynamical process in the vitreous state,' he and his team said in the same study. 'Our work improves substantially upon previous attempts at cryopreserving adult brain tissue.' Tissue from other organs, such as rat hearts and livers, have also been successfully cryopreserved and revived before. Whether this could eventually translate to putting an entire organ, even an entire organism, in a state of suspended animation requires future research. Some animals produce their own cryoprotectants as they transition to a state of torpor to avoid harsh winters. This is something else scientists could learn from in the pursuit of artificial suspended animation. Alien and Foundation are onto something. Putting humans into a state of suspended animation during spaceflight would drastically reduce the risk of tissue damage caused by microgravity and extreme radiation. No one is trekking to Mars—at least not yet—so we still have time, but even just the thought is no less tantalizing. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
